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Introduction: Beyond the Box
- The University of Alabama Press
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Introduction Beyond the Box Unlike the stage actor, the film actor cannot get over the footlights. —Leo Braudy, “Acting: Stage vs. Screen” Actor Franchot Tone left New York for Hollywood in the 1930s. Among all the stories of similar passage in The Fervent Years, Harold Clurman’s chronicle of the Group Theatre, this one reads as the most biblical tale of temptation in paradise . The theater offered meaningful work, artistic growth and experimentation, communal living, and a hand-to-mouth existence. Movies, by contrast, promised much better pay, swimming pools, and an easy lifestyle. During the Group’s tenure (1931–41), many of its best actors, Tone among the first, left for the West Coast in pursuit of a decent living. In theater’s “Golden Age,” Hollywood beckoned such trained stage talents to star in the new motion picture industry of “talkies.” Success in New York actually helped to launch a career in film. Today that migratory pattern has reversed directions. Success in the movies now downloads a ticket for the Broadway stage, but this shift is only symptomatic of a more important phenomenon. Until recently, plays were always considered as source material for movies. Even as late as the late 1960s, Susan Sontag claimed that plays could not be made from movies. Today, especially with musicals , that is simply not true. Theater now often serves merely as the brand extension of the larger and more lucrative film cartels. Even if a play is the source material for a subsequent film or television adaptation, the viewer is likely to accept the adaptation as the original and the stage play as the derived copy. Modern “smart” classrooms, a term invoked with no discernible irony, come loaded with television monitors and DVD and VCR players. It’s never been easier to present visual aids, and access to classic and contemporary plays has never been more immediately attainable. Unfortunately, students often now watch a film adaptation of a play as though it were the same as a theatrical production. Why bother to see stage drama, they reason logically, if the same thing is available to see in a much more accessible format? This book tries to answer that question by showing through numerous examples that plays and films do different things and create different experiences xii / Introduction and that those differences that the stage offers are worth seeing. If the theater is to continue to survive as a viable art form, it must do so on formal grounds and intrinsic qualities apart from any related cultural/social status. While it could be argued, I suppose, that theater still curries favor based upon exclusivity relative to mass entertainments such as film, that sad note is not something about which to brag. The fact that you often can’t see a play because it’s too expensive, too far away, too much in demand, too hard to hear, and maybe even too hard to understand is a problem, an admittedly annoying one, but unfortunately one that goes beyond the pale of my abilities and expertise to solve. I have restricted this study to a formal analysis of stage drama by comparing dramatic texts to their film and television adaptations. If I can demonstrate a play’s unique values, then perhaps I can redeem the physical and financial efforts required to witness it in performance. What follows, however, attempts not to aggrandize theater at the expense of film, a dubious proposition anyway, but to cite film as a tool for better seeing stage drama. Comparisons to be made are not so much side by side as they are layered, one on top of the other. Film provides the screen, the background of common experience, against which the drama plays and through which it can be interpreted and understood. Film language is now the vocabulary for modern experience : rapid cutting from one thing and place to another, quick and numerous alterations of perspective, shifts in time, and technological and mechanical reliance rooted in photography. The theater, which offers none of that, sticks viewers in one spot before the homogenous space of the stage. Owing to such relatively impoverished conditions, theater has often been considered as a predominantly literary experience, as opposed to the primarily visual experience of film, but one of the things I try to do in the following chapters is to blur that distinction and make a case for a spectacular theater. Cinema has historically taken a lot from the theater. Theater can take back...